The Post-Bilski Era Gets Underway 94
bfwebster writes "A set of pharmaceutical process patents for 'evaluating and improving the safety of immunization schedules' (Classen v. Biogen et al.; see US Patents 6,420,139; 6,638,379; 5,728,385; 5,723,283) were held to be invalid due to unpatentability. The decision was appealed to the US Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit, but was upheld with a terse citation to In re Bilski (which decision we discussed here). Here's the entire text of the appeals decision: 'In light of our decision in In re Bilski, 545 F.3d 943 (Fed. Cir. 2008) (en banc), we affirm the district court's grant of summary judgment that these claims are invalid under 35 U.S.C. 101. Dr. Classen's claims are neither "tied to a particular machine or apparatus" nor do they "transform a particular article into a different state or thing." Bilski, 545 F.3d at 954. Therefore we affirm.' It will be interesting to see what happens when these same standards start getting applied to software-related patents."
News for lawyers, Stuff that matters. (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:News for lawyers, Stuff that matters. (Score:3, Interesting)
As a rule of thumb, when a judge answers you with a single paragraph of "go away," you were stupid to even bring the case and pushing it is likely to lead only to heartbreak (and paying attorneys' fees) for you and your client.
I heartily recommend a diet of Groklaw [groklaw.net], to teach you as a technologist WTF the lawyers mean.
Re:Irrelevant. (Score:4, Interesting)
Comment removed (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:In other words... (Score:2, Interesting)
*Note: this has been written about now, therefor prior art now exists. You may not use this to validate this patent, or others.
Re:It's really not a huge change (Score:3, Interesting)
There are only a small amount of applications this effects and it's very easy to overcome, although I unfortunately can't go into much more depth than that.
I don't think you meant anything controversial but there's just something about that line that makes me grumpy. It sort of implies that the inner machinations of the patent system aren't meant for regular people to understand. It plays to the feeling, common around here, that the only thing that regular people, the kind that might start small software shops, need to know about software patents is that they can kill your business if your competitors are big.
I know that's not what you meant, it's probably your job that prevents you from commenting further.
Still, how many little guys have not tried to pursue a really good idea that might attract attention from MegaSoftware Inc. because they fear getting a registered letter with scary legal documents that say "patent infringement" because some rich guy on his yacht called his $500/hr lawyers and said "that guy is good...kill him?"
Anyway, I kind of launched into a screed there. My fingers just typed it I don't know why.
Not so (Score:5, Interesting)
Industry argued that the paper rolls should be patentable, because they constituted physical items that controlled a physical machine. The courts ruled (quite properly, in my opinion) that the physical form of the music is irrelevant; it might be possible, for example, to make a machine that could read music directly off the paper it was written on. Does that make it fundamentally a "different" product or work from the original? The answer was unequivocally "NO".
The same holds for written vs. compiled software: there is no fundamental difference between the results of software that is run in realtime by an interpreter (which reads the source code directly), and the results produced by the same program when compiled. If the interpreter and compiler are constructed properly, the output is identical. Therefore there is no legal (or moral, or ethical, or logical) difference. For all practical purposes they are the SAME.
It is precisely because industry has managed, after all this time, to finally get the courts to be sympathetic to the position that software should be patentable that we are having all these troubles. During the long period when it was understood and accepted that software was a copyright issue rather than a patent issue, such problems seldom arose. Now they are everywhere. Also, software patents have a chilling effect on innovation; we have seen this time and again, even some really egregious examples. It is clear by now that software patents have very little if any societal benefit, in proportion to the harm that they cause.
Unless It Hits KSR (Score:4, Interesting)
It still will need to pass the hurdle of "obviousness" under KSR, which basically lays down a standard of using commonly known components in accordance with known techniques and getting the predictable result is highly likely to be "obvious" and thus fail patentability.
What I found interesting in this case is that the courts have told the patent attorneys in this case that the Bilski ruling actually means what it says, and that trying to game their way around it will result in summary execution of thier case.
The rules have fundamentally changed.